Ryder Architecture is part of a team that developed the Northern Arc plan to link Liverpool with Manchester, Leeds, Newcastle, Edinburgh and Glasgow.

The Hyperloop line would propel “pods” full of passengers on a maglev track at hundreds of miles an hour through a sealed tube. The Liverpool to Manchester leg would take six minutes.

It sounds like science fiction – but the first Hyperloop test track has already been built in Nevada, USA, backed by Silicon Valley billionaire Elon Musk.

And now the Northern Arc team has won a global competition to work with Hyperloop to take its plans forward.

It’s one of ten winners in the Hyperloop One Global Challenge. And now Ryder and engineering giant Arup, the firms which have led the Northern Arc scheme, will produce a more detailed report into how this ambitious scheme could get funded and get built.

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Paul Bell, a partner at Ryder, told the ECHO he was confident that the team could make a Hyperloop happen in the North.

He said: “Yes, it sounds very futuristic.

“We started looking at it seriously and investing time and effort into it about 18 or 20 months ago. In that timeline, things have moved on at an incredible pace.

“The Hyperloop concept track in Nevada has been constructed. They’re progressing with their testing.

“They’ve had their Kitty Hawk moment where they have propelled and levitated the test board.

“We met some ‘future rail’ academics earlier this summer. We chatted about the fact that Hyperloop was likely to happen at some point in the world in the next 10 years. They laughed and said to me that it’ll happen much more quickly than that.”

The Northern Arc plan would see Hyperloop One vehicles travel from Liverpool to Glasgow in 47 minutes

The Hyperloop One full-scale test track in the Nevada desert

In May, Hyperloop engineers successfully sent a metal sled down their Nevada test track. It was billed as a “Kitty Hawk” moment, after the town where the Wright Brothers made their first ever aircraft flights.

The Hyperloop test track, and many of the images already produced by Hyperloop, would see carriages propelled through a tube built on stilts above ground.

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But for the Northern Arc, Mr Bell said: “There will be situations where it’s better underground, for geographical and topographical reasons.

“Certainly between Manchester and Leeds, underground would make a lot of sense. With the tunnel engineering required for Hyperloop, the tunnels need much smaller bores than would be required for traditional rail.

“But there are other places where it would make sense for the line to run above ground.”

The Northern Arc plan would see Hyperloop One vehicles travel from Liverpool to Glasgow in 47 minutes

Another finalist in the Global Challenge is proposing a London to Edinburgh Hyperloop.

Meanwhile there’s another ongoing proposal for a super high-speed railway in the North.